Senior Staff Software Engineer, Media Algorithms, YouTube

Minimum qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.
• 8 years of experience in audio or video processing and software development.
• 7 years of experience in thought leadership, execution, and prototyping.
• 5 years of experience working on audio algorithm and product development, including audio or video coding, processing, streaming, and large-scale deployment.

Preferred qualifications:

• Master’s degree or a PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.
• 5 years of experience in leadership roles, navigating ambiguous projects and setting technical direction.
• 2 years of experience in Large Language Model (LLM) or Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) application and product development.
• Knowledge of signal processing, machine learning, data analysis, and generative models.
• Excellent investigative thinking, technical design, audio or video processing, and machine learning skills.

About the job

Google's software engineers develop the next-generation technologies that change how billions of users connect, explore, and interact with information and one another. Our products need to handle information at massive scale, and extend well beyond web search. We're looking for engineers who bring fresh ideas from all areas, including information retrieval, distributed computing, large-scale system design, networking and data storage, security, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, UI design and mobile; the list goes on and is growing every day. As a software engineer, you will work on a specific project critical to Google’s needs with opportunities to switch teams and projects as you and our fast-paced business grow and evolve. We need our engineers to be versatile, display leadership qualities and be enthusiastic to take on new problems across the full-stack as we continue to push technology forward.

The Media Algorithms team at YouTube is a mix of audio/video processing and transcoding domain experts and software engineers, focused on researching and improving YouTube’s video infrastructure. We work on building guardrails for YouTube’s audio and video quality, on optimizing trade-offs between quality and scaling costs such as network and resource usage, and on innovating backend transcoding or processing infrastructure to effectively serve massive amounts of video to billions of users across a wide range of devices. You will have the opportunity to build and work on video coding, processing, and evaluation standards, and advanced Machine Learning (ML) or Artificial Intelligence (AI) audio and video models, and apply ideas to products at a planet-scale.

At YouTube, we believe that everyone deserves to have a voice, and that the world is a better place when we listen, share, and build community through our stories. We work together to give everyone the power to share their story, explore what they love, and connect with one another in the process. Working at the intersection of cutting-edge technology and boundless creativity, we move at the speed of culture with a shared goal to show people the world. We explore new ideas, solve real problems, and have fun — and we do it all together.

Responsibilities

• Generate the ideas, algorithms, and tools to ensure excellent video experience for our users.
• Execute focused research and rapid-prototyping of new audio technologies, deploying them in YouTube's video infrastructure pipelines.
• Enhance the audio at YouTube and delight our creators and users with novel audio capabilities.
• Develop AI/ML models to evaluate and optimize audio quality, audio algorithms, codecs or formats, and audio products.
• Collaborate with internal (cross-Google) and external research and development teams, fostering engagement and working closely with product managers to define product road maps and align on long-term cross-functional initiatives.